It is plenty early enough to be announcing the shortlists for 2016 with a possible candidate for the Best Event category still to come, which is the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concert next month, but the lists are always open to late additions and the main action is otherwise mostly done.
The main objective is a review of the year - from my narrow perspective- in poetry but there are the subsidiary categories added in to make an occasion of it. And this year the Best Event category is the most enthralling, given its wide remit and a list of candidates that, even if you think that things within the same genre can be or should be compared in such an arbitrary way, really ought not to be.
So, I'm carrying around four books of poems with me, with no idea which is the best of them.
Best Poem
Judy Brown, After the Discovery of Linear Perspective, from Crowd Sensations
Helen Farish, Pastoral, TLS and The Dog of Memory
Margaret Wilmot, Susannah and Titian, South 54
Best Collection
Judy Brown, Crowd Sensations
Ian Duhig, The Blind Road-Maker
Helen Farish, The Dog of Memory
Bernard O'Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church
Best Novel
Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
Ian MacEwan, Nutshell
Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday
Best CD
Hans Abrahamsen, let me tell you, Barbara Hannigan
Francois Couperin, Lecons de Tenebres, Lucy Crowe and Elizabeth Watts
Errolyn Wallen, Photography
Best Event
Cherltenham races, April, with four winners out of five selections
The Good Old Days, BBC4's generous helping of Leonard Sachs et al from the 1970's
The Spinnaker Tower, Portsmouth, having finally been up it and a new, rewarding perspective on the city
The Shakespeare Twins Theory, finally published, in the TLS, but not for the theory itself (by Curtis-Green), but for the reaction to it, derided on Twitter (by the subsequently ennobled Prof Stanley Wells, Paul Edmondson and Prof Emma Smith) but not refuted
Ulysses' Homecoming, English Touring Opera
There are two of the above categories where I'm fairly sure which is my favourite but there's more thinking to do before dishing out these awards, where it is highly unlikely that the winners will even be aware that they've won.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
